* The steady erection of a system of minority rule that Republicans are implementing is not as dramatic as a populist putsch. But it’s actually happening before our eyes. And it’s led not by the rabble-rousing president or the unwashed masses who thrill to his rallies, but by the elite network of donors, operatives, and politicians who run the Republican Party and the conservative movement.

What if I told you one of the largest ever undertakings in American historic preservation was happening not through the graces of any large institution, but through the autonomous participation of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of individuals across the country, who are collectively stitching together their own narrative of architectural history?

The “Kmart” group on the photo-sharing website Flickr has amassed a staggering twenty-five thousand photos of its subject, a struggling American discount store. It hardly matters that, against the grain of the high-architectural image factory, many of these photos could not be called artistic—a number of them appear to have been taken with shaky cell phones, or from the wrong side of a speeding car. The production of high-gloss photography is not the purpose of this group. It’s purpose is to document a slow extinction.

* But Neel makes the unifying, underlying dynamics hard to deny — dynamics of dwindling state resources, growing demands stemming from unfolding climate catastrophe and rising superfluity, and deepening threats to government capacity and legitimacy. This is stark terrain that too few scholars glimpse with any clarity. Its implications are massive.

With some new responsibilities post-tenure, a new work-childcare schedule that I’m still getting used to, and some intense end-of-the-summer deadline crunches, I haven’t had the time to do a link post in a while. As most of you know, I use this blog primarily as a research aid for myself; it’s a big compendium of more or less everything I’ve found interesting or useful on the Internet in the last fifteen years, and for that reason I like to keep it as complete as possible (even if that sometimes means the link posts get very long). That said, I had about 400 tabs open among my devices — it might be more than that! — and there’s just no way I can put everything I’ve looked at since August on here. So today’s format constraint was supposed to be that I have to brutally limit myself to as many links as there were days since I last posted, and close every other tab; that didn’t really work in practice, but at least now all the tabs are closed and I can move on with my life. Here goes!

Here’s where I would like to propose a thought experiment. Fast forward 66m years. Imagine some intelligent life form arrives (or re-evolves) on earth. It wants to know: what “caused” the sixth great extinction? What are they likely to conclude from the available evidence? 9/

The popular scifi of the 21st century will be Americans sublimating their guilt by imagining themselves as victims, and the rest of the world sublimating the nightmare that is an actually-existing hostile, amoral entity antithetical to human life

Why isn’t every editorial board, every media head, every member of Congress demanding the regime give access to where girls, toddlers and babies are being held? It’s over a week now. What is Trump hiding?!

* In a proposal that could bring the uproar over President Trump’s controversial “zero tolerance” immigration policy to the Bay Area, the Navy is considering converting a shuttered Concord naval base into a detention facility to hold up to 47,000 immigrants apprehended at the southern border, according to a draft memo obtained Friday by TIME.

First, you're never going to win a head on battle with an adversary that's got you outgunned. That's not the point of the Resistance. The point is to create friction, make it hard for your adversary to operate, to increase transaction costs.

Seven, be very careful with whom you trust. Snitches and compromised individuals are everywhere. My Dad was arrested because of a snitch. His friends weren't so lucky, the Gestapo machine gunned the cabin they were in without bothering to try and arrest them.

When the Gremlins take over Clamp Tower, they provoke a state of emergency. In this situation, a sovereign is allowed by law to violate the law, it is "legal illegality". In these moments the true nature of the law is revealed – we see the CEO, Clamp, leading a SWAT team.

* It’s a little after nine o’clock. Hal’s sons stop sipping their lattes and the oceanographic scientist behind me puts down his handful of M&M’s. If Hal Wanless is right, every single object I have seen over the past 72 hours – the periodic table of elements hanging above his left shoulder, the buffet currently loaded with refreshments, the smoothie stand at my seaside hotel, the beach umbrellas and oxygen bars, the Johnny Rockets and seashell shop, the lecture hall with its hundreds of mostly empty teal swivel chairs – will all be underwater in the not-so-distant future.

#TheResistance becoming preoccupied with completely made-up fantasies about Melania while all reporting about Puerto Rico continues to be buried and ICE kidnaps children at the border sure feels like a metaphor for something.

American flag-waving obfuscates these and other abuses of power; reveals the state’s protection and definition of a white, hetero socioeconomic class as the legitimate citizen class at the expense of black, brown, Muslim, trans, disabled, or immigrant lives; and is our traditional response to a sense of foreign impingement on “normal American life” (white suburban families). The message goes: Don’t think about the President’s baseless claims about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, don’t think about the imprisonment of Chelsea Manning and, now, Reality Winner, don’t think about the dependence of all power on a disenfranchised, exploited class. Think instead of the firefighters at ground zero, who were certain that America would endure. Think of ordinary citizens, like those depicted in the “Main Street USA” ad, and their faith in this city on a hill. Think instead, “Make America Great Again!” Don’t ask: Who suffers in this society when the state makes better security and freedom for its populace a goal? Freedom for whom? Who does a Muslim ban serve? Who do police serve? On which caskets do we lay the flag?

* In 1975, Gary Gygax revealed the Tomb of Horrors module at the first Origins convention, presenting it as a campaign that would specifically challenge overpowered characters who would have to rely on their wits to outsmart incredibly lethal, subtle traps, rather than using their almighty THACOs to fell trash-mobs of orcs or other low-level monsters.

* A research question I’ve been pondering for awhile: When, exactly, did the idea that the President — and only the President — was in charge of the decision to use nuclear weapons get turned into real policy? Answer seems to be September 1948, with NSC-30.

Insisting on the right to convert every US political leader into a heroic & noble saint upon death, while condemning critics as gauche & classless, is propaganda. It's easy to dismiss all the deaths McCain has caused because they're distant and invisible, but they still matter.

5. But these theories do not have any explanatory power regarding why the vote broke down the way it did demographically. Only one broad demographic seemed to be receptive to the kind of campaign that Trump ran on: white people. https://t.co/sdoOzrSVTLpic.twitter.com/UHEM9e3A0W